Michael Thaman
Analyst · Bob Wetenhall with RBC
Sure. I mean, I would tell you in Hangzhou, when we pushed ahead with that facility kind of in the darkest hours of '09, there were a lot of times we sat around the table and said, "Do we really need to move forward, is this market going to move forward?" And history had always shown that after the composites market contracted, it would then recover pretty quickly. And we kind of trusted history and we trusted our instincts on that, so let's move forward with the facility. And at the same time, we used capacity that we had in the U.S. and capacity that we had in Europe to build our position in China. So that in fact, when the facility came online late 2010, early '11, that the facility was effectively loaded. That strategy’s just worked out perfectly. So as we sit here today, we're very happy with the timing, we're very happy with the asset we decided to build. A Composites facility goes through what's called heat-up, where you put the batch ingredients into the melter, you have to get it to temperature, you have to start making good glass and then you have to be able to make that good glass into a final form that can ship to our customers. The learning curve on that can take a while. I mean, it could 30, 60, 90 days before we really have a facility that's running at world-class levels. That's probably the activity for us in the first quarter. I would think by the end of the first quarter, we're going to have a low-cost facility in China, we're going to be able to shut down some shipping lanes that exist from North America and Europe to China to save some freight costs. We're going to get some additional product that might be available for us to sell in North America and Europe. And in doing that, it'll start to have a pretty nice impact for our business in 2011. And then following on that, obviously, we'll get a full year impact in 2012. I would expect the Russia expansion, now, that's not a new facility; we had an existing facility there and we've expanded that capacity, which we also believe is very low-cost. I think the Russia expansion will have the same kind of profile into 2012, just with a different magnitude because there's a lot less capacity.